I’m not homeless, I’m just a writer
Left: As good as it gets. Right: What you’ll probably get.
As I was walking back from the grocery store, down the sidewalks of Chicago, I drifted out of my usual brainstorm haze with the sudden realization of how I must look to the people I pass along the way.
My hair’s months overdue for a cut, my beard is wild and unmanaged, the cuffs of my jeans sway in tatters around my ankles. My clothes are a size or two too big for me, and I have the disconcerting habit of muttering to myself as I work out bits of dialog or narration, having conversations with people who only exist, as yet, in my head.
Are you leery of me? I’d be leery of me.
As a full-time writer working from home, I spend the bulk of the day in relative isolation, with naught but the cat to keep me company after my girlfriend goes off to work and until she gets back. I do not, as yet, make enough money to support the two of us entirely on my own, and she (the girlfriend, not the cat) is the wonderfully independent sort who would never be content with that sort of arrangement in any event. Even if we had the firm financial state that would allow her to pursue her own artistic goals, they’re the sort of things that would have her out and about the city, acting and taking photographs of things, not hidden away keeping me company.
And that’s fine. I prefer to work in isolation, to secret myself away from the world and lose myself in the creative trance. It’s my drug.
It’s not so much that I’m contemptuous of the social conventions that others expect of me, it’s just that I forget that they exist. I don’t realize how shaggy and uncivilized I look until I see myself reflected in a shop window. If I bother to look, lost in the creative trance as I shamble to and from the store, a distant expression on my face.
It does bother me that my clothes don’t fit, but I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, and I’ve got a bit more to drop before the rate slows to the point where it takes significant effort to lose it. I’m leery of buying new clothes that won’t fit me in a month, so I’m putting that off for now.
Anyway, the truth of the matter is that my job, full-time writer, does not require any sort of actual social interaction. Not at my level of success, anyway. And I’m too close to the margin to feel comfortable not working for significant periods of time, so I tend to turn down social invitations more often than I should.
Full disclosure: I actually was homeless for years.
Not “living under an overpass” homeless, but “couch-surfing and living out of a suitcase” homeless. Between 2007 and 2011 or so I was moving around, state to state, couch to couch, trying to find work and staying with whomever hadn’t quite run out of welcome yet. I’d find work freelancing and, more and more rarely, temping, but a full-time job eluded me.
Still, homeless or not, I was going to interviews, and had to look my best. I had clean, fitting clothes. I shaved before every interview, and got a haircut every few months. Walking down the street on my way to my umpteenth fruitless appointment I’d look like essentially any other commuter.
Giving up on the job hunt and starting my career as a professional author gave me agency over my own life. It was only after I started earning a living wage that I could afford to let go of pretense and become the slovenly writer that was inside, trying to get out. It was only when I could afford to see to my health that I started losing weight, that my clothes became baggy on my frame.
This simply will not do.
Is this an author and his cat, or a homeless guy who’s fallen asleep next to his only friend? Can’t it be both?
As a writer, a purveyor of creative arts, I have a great deal more latitude than those engaged in more traditional employment. This is not license to let myself devolve into a roiling mass of human wreckage. I can blame the insane work schedule I’ve set myself, I can point fingers at the isolating effects of poverty – even if I had the time to go out and be social, I can’t afford to do much my friends are off doing – but in the end I am control of this, in control of my image.
The artist has freedom to look how he wants, dress how he wants, be who he wants, in a way that most professions can’t even conceive of. Is “Distracted Vagrant” my true self?
No.
At least, I hope not.
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